Sep 16 – 20, 2024
Knoxville Convention Center (KCC)
US/Eastern timezone
GRCon24 will take place in Knoxville, TN from Sept 16-20

5G Base-Station with Hardware Acceleration for Non-Terrestrial Networks on a Space-Grade System-on-Chip

Sep 18, 2024, 11:30 AM
30m
Ballroom AB (Knoxville Convention Center (KCC))

Ballroom AB

Knoxville Convention Center (KCC)

Paper (with talk) Heterogeneous signal processing frameworks Main Track

Speaker

Michael Petry

Description

The expansion of cellular networks, specifically 5G, beyond the limits of Earth into Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) is one of the hottest topics in cellular communications today. By employing space- and air-borne base stations, the term “no service” could become obsolete, enabling critical services for maritime, aeronautical, and disaster-affected regions. Despite its potential, the practical realization of space-bound components entails formidable challenges due to hazardous radiation and energy constraints.
We present a concept that builds on space-qualified hardware technology. By exploiting a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), ASIC-like vector processors, and a CPU on a heterogeneous processing platform, we realize a partly hardware-accelerated gNodeB based on a heavily modified OpenAirInterface low Earth orbit branch. Our benchmarks show that offloading computationally intensive physical layer signal processing operations, as well as RF frontend-related protocol handling, to the FPGA is essential for achieving the required 5G data rates and significantly higher energy efficiency compared to a CPU-only implementation. Our findings imply that future efforts should primarily focus on offloading additional processing-intensive components. A discussion on further steps towards core network integration concludes this paper.

Talk Length 30 Minutes

Primary authors

Presentation materials